Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXII

The Choir of Winchester

Cathedral--site of the

marriage of Mary and

Philip   July 1554 

Mary’s first challenge was to secure a Catholic succession to the throne as the heir apparent was her half-sister, Elizabeth, a convinced Protestant.  Elizabeth did conform to Catholicism during her sister’s reign, but Mary knew it was a charade: after all, in Catholic eyes, Elizabeth was a bastard and as such could not inherit the Crown.  Indeed, this was to be the conflict for Mary because she was not only a thorough Catholic, but she was every bit her father’s daughter and wanted the Tudor Dynasty to survive.  So she needed a child of her own to displace Elizabeth and keep the Crown Catholic.  Mary was 37 when she came to the throne—in the 16^th century an age at which many women no longer ovulated.   Several English husbands (including Reginald Pole, of whom we will hear more in the future) were suggested, but Mary’s cousin, the Emperor Charles V, suggested she marry his only son, Philip. 
Philip was nine-years younger than Mary.  He was King of Naples and Duke of Milan and he stood to inherit the vast domains of his father, the Emperor.  (In fact, Charles would divide his realms between the Holy Roman Empire which went to his brother, Ferdinand,  and the Spanish Empire which he would give to Philip.) 
The Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, and the House of Lords petitioned Mary to marry English and not seek a foreign husband, but Mary was distrustful of her countrymen. She had seen their collective lack of integrity in how they failed to champion her mother’s cause against King Henry and she saw how fickle was their faith as they first went pacifically along with Henry’s break with Rome and then just as nonchalantly threw away fourteen centuries of Catholic doctrine and practice in favor of the Reformed Religion of her brother and Cranmer.   Moreover Mary felt she owed Charles for his support of her mother and herself during their long suffering and humiliation under Henry and his shabby treatment of them.   Philip was to receive the Crown Matrimonial which meant he would be King of England, but only by right of his marriage to Mary.  They would reign jointly but should she pre-decease him, all titles and rights would end.  He was to “aid her Highness in the happy administration of her Grace’s realms and dominions.”  In other words, his role was mostly ceremonial and the power remained with Mary.  Even so, the marriage grated the English people and Mary’s popularity began to sink.  England felt threatened on every side—Spain, France, the Empire—and no foreign prince would be a welcome King for their Queen, but the Spaniards were seen as particularly arrogant and thus even more offensive to the understated English personality.  In fact this was the beginning of an English-Spanish conflict that would last three and a half centuries.    
The proposed Spanish marriage triggered a rebellion in the winter of 1554.  The rebels, under Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir James Croft, Sir Peter Carew, and Henry Grey, 1^st Duke of Suffolk planned to overthrow Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne.  Grey was the Father of Lady Jane Grey and all the rebellion did was to bring down the axe on the rebels, including Lady Jane and her husband, Guildford Dudley.  It also built up the paranoia Mary was feeling as she became more and more alienated from her subjects and planted a fear of the Protestant faction in her heart. 
Her husband arrived in England on July 23, 1554 and Mary and Philip were married in Winchester Cathedral two days later by Bishop Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor.    For Mary this was a love match.  For Philip, nine years her junior, the marriage was a political duty.  Political duty does not always make a prime stimulant for the husband “to be ready” to perform his husbandly duties.  To the contrary, it can take a normally pleasant activity and make it a burdensome chore.  Nevertheless, by September—two months after the wedding—Mary stopped menstruating and showed other signs of pregnancy.  This was followed by a set of bizarre circumstances that are difficult for us to interpret today, but apparently the Queen experienced a hysteric (false) pregnancy brought on by her desperate wish to be pregnant.  She didn’t menstruate, her abdomen expanded as if she were pregnant, she gained weight, experienced morning sickness, and even lactation.  The Court was convinced she was pregnant.  Her doctors were convinced she was pregnant.  Rumors spread of the birth of a son and Thanksgiving Services were held in several cathedrals, but no child was ever produced.  When by June 1555 she had not yet delivered, there was huge confusion in the Court.  And in July her abdomen receded and other signs of pregnancy disappeared.  Philip left England in August on a military expedition and though Mary did not know at the time he would not return for two years—and then only for a short visit—she was disconsolate and felt abandoned.   Whatever chances that Mary might have had to bear a healthy child also disappeared after her hysterical pregnancy, the effects of which may have led eventually to her death of uterine cancer.  But that is still several years off. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXI

Martyrdom of Bishop Hooper 

Back to the reign of Mary and the fate of the Reformers in that reign.  Mary was not the fanatical Catholic that John Foxe in his famous Actes and Monuments (aka “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”)  and his literary heirs, the 19^th century Evangelical Anglican authors, would make her out to be.  But she was a tormented soul, and her torment caused pain—real pain—for countless of religious dissenters.

Remember that for the first seventeen years of her life she had been not only a royal princess, but the heir-apparent to the Throne of England.  On an even more important foundation, for the first ten years or so of her life she enjoyed the security of her parents having a reasonably loving marriage.  When she was bout thirteen that marriage was souring fast, and Mary found herself torn between the conflicting interests of her two parents.  At this period of life she began to experience severe menstrual issues that may have been—it is too late for an autopsy—due to the stress of seeing her parents’ marriage fall apart and her own future cast in doubt.  Her father, whom she adored, “didn’t want” her as Queen to succeed him.  He loved a yet-to-conceived son over a daughter whom he had fashioned into an elegant and learned woman.  When Archbishop Cranmer—and this key people, pay attention—annulled her parents’ marriage, Mary lost the Title “Royal Highness,”  and her status as a Princess.  She was now simply The Lady Mary, the King’s bastard.  This is a difficult comedown, and if so for an English Princess, even more for an Infanta of Spain, granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the founders of the Spanish Empire and the most powerful (as well as the most blue-blooded) royalty of Europe.   All of a sudden her prospects for a marriage of rank and a life of privilege disappeared.   Her father appointed her a Lady-in-Waiting the little Boleyn baby that had taken her place in history.  That was humiliating, but what was far more painful is that he separated her from her mother in an attempt to force both Mary and Katherine to acknowledge the annulment, the Boleyn marriage, and the succession of the new Princess, Elizabeth. 

When Mary came to the throne she freely promised not to disturb the consciences of any of her subjects.  Moreover, as we have seen, bishops and clergy—even those who had supported Cranmer’s Reform—were allowed to remain in their Sees and Benefices (and many promoted) providing they were willing to give up their wives, and return to Catholic doctrine and practice.  One has to admit that the clergy of the Church of England were, for the most part, more committed to their having a job than having a wife.  But even today how many marriages falter on career vs. commitment? 

Remember:  Mary had a score that she was determined to settle and that was with Archbishop Cranmer, the man whose toadieness to her father, had broken her mother’s heart and taken away her own happiness for over twenty years.   Mary was going to make the Archbishop pay.  We will get to that in a future posting as Cranmer’s role in the reign of Queen Mary deserves an entry—at least one—of its own.

In 1554, as part of the negotiations to readmit the Church of England to the Roman Communion, the old Heresy Acts were revived.  Mary had already arrested the handful of Protestant bishops who would not back down on Cranmer’s Reforms.  She now prosecuted them and had them executed.  As the reign went on—and we will look at this—Mary seems to have become more and more impassioned against the religious changed that had taken place in England.  There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the leading reasons undoubtedly was her increasing anxiety that she would not be able to provide a heir to the throne and the Crown would go to her Protestant sister Elizabeth who would restore the Protestant faith.  Mary was determined to keep England Catholic, even after she died.

It was only in 1555, two years after her coming to the throne, that persecution of Protestants broke out in force.  In the remaining three and a half years of her reign, about 300 ordinary Englishmen died in defense of their Protestant faith, most very cruelly by being burned “at the stake.”  In the big picture Mary was no more “bloody” than had been her father or would be her sister in the days of their having worn the crown.  But the memory of the “Marian Martyrs” long provided grist for the mill of anti-papalism in England.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVI

"Lady Mary" Tudor c 1544

Mary I of England, aka “Bloody Mary” is a very complex character and to understand her reign you have to take a look at the ups and downs of her life.  Mary was the fourth of five children born to Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon.  (There was also one miscarried daughter.)  Each of the other children, including three brothers, died shortly after birth or in infancy, leaving Mary the only heir to her father’s kingdom.  As long as there was prospects for more children—including the hoped for son—Mary had a charmed life.  She was given an extraordinary education in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Music, dancing, and mathematics and was introduced to all the brilliant European scholars who were drawn to her father’s court through his friends such as Sir Thomas More and other humanists.  As a very young girl she was invested with many ceremonial duties and even referred to as the “Princess of Wales” though never invested with that title.  Her father gave her her own household with her ladies in waiting and servants and estates, but when he decided to have his marriage annulled in the hopes that a future wife would produce the longed for male heir, Mary was declared illegitimate, lost her status as princess, was simply “The Lady Mary.”  To add to the indignity, she was assigned as a Lady in Waiting to her infant half-sister, Elizabeth, Henry’s daughter by Anne Boleyn.  This degradation ruined any hope of an escape from England via a royal marriage and condemned Mary to perpetual spinsterhood.  Mary was sent away from Court to live at Hundson House, one of Henry’s hunting lodges in Hertfordshire.   

Henry was a stubborn man and Mary was an apple that fell from that tree.  Mary refused to recognize Henry’s claims to be head of the Church, his “annulment” from her mother, Katherine, or the legitimacy and royalty of her half-sister, the new heir.  Henry, to force her into compliance, would not allow Mary to see her mother who, after her being degraded from Queen to “Dowager Princess of Wales” (her title as the widow of Henry’s older brother and deceased Prince of Wales, Arthur), was forced into exile at The More and later at Kimbolton Castle.  Both Mary and Katherine were seriously ill at this time and Mary’s health issues were probably due to the stress that Henry was putting her under in keeping her away from her mother in her mother’s hour of need.  Meanwhile, Henry’s new wife, Anne Boleyn encouraged Henry in his hardness of heart.   Anne’s insecurity left her with a pathological determination to keep both Katherine and Mary in disgrace, but Anne’s reign was short-lived and when Henry left her (and had her beheaded) for his third wife, Jane Seymour, the tune changed.  Jane was a woman of lovely temperament and wanted things smoothed over.  Katherine was dead by this time and Jane convinced Henry to bring Mary back to Court.  Henry agreed to do so on the conditions that Mary recognize him as head of the Church, that she recognize her parents’ marriage as annulled, and that she recognize her own illegitimacy.  Mary was, at this point, broken.  She had no way out but to accept her father’s terms.  She had no sources of income, no friends (other than the Spanish Ambassador who was anxious to use her for his own diplomatic ends), and no roof over her head accept what the charity of others might provide.  Mary caved in and Henry was most generous.  Although she was not restored to the status of a Princess, she was brought back to Court, given the palaces of Beaulieu and Richmond as well as Hatfield House and Hundson as her own, and provided with a very generous allowance for clothing, entertainment (including gambling), and maintaining her retinue.  She was a Princess in all but title.  When Henry was between wives 5 and 6, Mary filled in as the hostess for royal functions.  Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and final wife, though a convinced Protestant took a particular liking to Mary (they were almost the same age).  Katherine was an exceptionally kind woman—in great part due to her genuinely religious nature—and did what she could to rebuild a family out of the shambles of Henry’s marriages and the pains and jealousies of his children that resulted.  Henry also—and this is very important for what was to happen at the end of King Edward’s reign—restored Mary and Elizabeth (in that order) to the succession to the Crown. 

Henry’s death meant a deterioration in Mary’s position.  Her half-brother Edward was a Protestant but, unlike their stepmother Katherine Parr, was an intolerant   fanatic.  This was most likely due to his age and the consequent immaturity that could not cope with ambiguities, but it was fed by the Protestant faction at Court led by his uncle, the Duke of Somerset and Archbishop Cranmer.  Mary remained away from Court through most of her brother’s reign to avoid conflict, but Edward tried to forbid her Catholic worship and Mary would not worship otherwise.   There was a terrible scene in the Christmas Court of 1550 when Edward went ballistic about Mary ignoring Edward’s new laws insisting on the reformed rites of the 1549 Prayer Book.  Neither Mary nor Edward would budge.

Mary’s absolute refusal to accept the Protestant religion had probably as much to do as clinging the memory of what her mother had suffered after her dismissal from Court as it had to do with doctrinal conviction.  I don’t mean that Mary was not a convinced Catholic, but rather that she was fiercely loyal to her mother and knew the price her mother had paid.  Mary was determined to put things back the way they had been before everything “went south” with her father’s design to cast off Queen Katherine for Anne Boleyn.  It was as much Tudor stubbornness as it was Catholic faith that would guide Mary’s policies once she became queen.

She permitted a Protestant funeral for her brother—according to Cranmer’s rites with “an English Communion” rather than with a Catholic Mass.  The sermon, however, was preached not by a Protestant but by one of the schismatic bishops, George Day of Chichester, who would help Mary guide the Church of England back into the Roman Communion.   Mary did not attend the funeral—it was not the custom for the new sovereign (or even a member of the immediate royal family) to attend the funeral rites for the departed sovereign—or for anyone else for that matter.  Neither Edward nor his sisters attended their father’s funeral; Elizabeth was not to attend Mary’s.  A nobleman of the court would be appointed to be “chief mourner” in place of the sovereign.    Mary herself had served as chief mourner for Henry’s wife #3, Jane Seymour, who had been the one to reconcile Henry with his estranged daughter. 

Putting Edward’s body in their grandfather’s tomb in Westminster Abbey was not enough to bring the English Church back into the Roman Communion.  It would take the better part of a year and a half before England was restored to papal jurisdiction.  More about that soon. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVII

Let’s take a look in this entry at Stephen Gardiner—yet another English Churchman who sided with Henry VIII in his break from Rome but later regretted the choice and stood firm against the tendencies to introduce Protestant doctrine and liturgy in the Church of England.

Gardiner's Cathedral at
Winchester

Gardiner was born in Bury St Edmunds 1483 into a family of the merchant class but of considerable wealth.  Gardiner studied the Greek and Latin classics at Cambridge and then turned to the civil and the canon law, earning a doctorate in each.  When he was still in his twenties and studying in Paris, he was introduced to the Dutch humanist, Erasmus, one of the leading voices for Church Reform at the time.  Cardinal Wolsey, then Lord Chancellor, had a keen eye for talent and soon recognized in Gardiner a man of outstanding intellectual abilities as well as practical skills.  He was first introduced to Henry VIII in 1525 and in 1527 was employed along with Thomas More as commissioners for a treaty with France against the Emperor Charles V. 

It is interesting that Henry was seeking a treat against the interests of Charles just at the time when he was beginning his efforts to divorce Charles’ aunt, Katherine of Aragon.  This political maneuvering only served to harden Charles’ efforts against Henry and his policies and Charles’ resistance to the sought-after annulment.  In many ways Henry mismanaged the politics of his sought-after annulment but he did have an able agent in Gardiner.  Gardiner was sent by Henry on a number of diplomatic efforts to win support for “The King’s Great Matter,” i.e. the annulment.  In 1528 Gardiner was sent to the papal court where his superior knowledge of canon law served him well on Henry’s behalf, but as Clement was determined for reasons of his own—and Medici interest—not to give Henry the annulment under any circumstances, ultimately Gardiner failed in his mission. Henry appreciated his efforts, however, and made sure he was given a number of prestigious Church positions with generous salaries.  (Henry was not one to pay his agents out of his own pocket.)  In 1531 Gardiner went to his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, to convince the university to support the King’s claim that the marriage to Katherine was against Divine Law and he was successful in his arguments.  This was not as easy an effort as might be supposed as Katherine was very popular and the Boleyn faction was deeply resented, but the King hoped that if the leading universities of Europe—and Cambridge was one—supported his case from a legal stance, that the papacy would be forced to grant the annulment.  Again, Henry did not realize that Clement was anxious to please the Emperor in the hopes of forging a marriage between his (Clement’s) illegitimate son Allesandro and the Emperor’s illegitimate daughter, Margaret, which would restore the Medici to power in Florence.  In the end, an apparition of Christ in Glory could not have gotten Henry his annulment.  Henry appreciated Gardiner’s winning over Cambridge and rewarded him by naming him Bishop of Winchester.  As the break with Rome had not yet taken place, the appointment was submitted to the Pope for approval and approval was given in the hopes of placating Henry.  However, the following year Gardiner showed his independence from Henry by writing the “Answer of the Ordinaries”—the collective response of the English Bishops to the complaints about the Church that Henry was trying to use as leverage to force the bishops into compliance with his plans. 

Gardiner supported the King in his case for an annulment and it was his legal skill that Thomas Cranmer drew on in issuing the annulment of  May 1533.  Moreover, Gardiner—the canon lawyer—drew up the appeal over the Pope to a General Council that Henry was contemplating to win his annulment.  In 1535 Gardiner wrote the treatise De vera obedientia (Concerning authentic obedience) to provide a canonical justification for Henry’s being head of the Church. And he wrote Henry’s response to Clement when Clement threatened to depose Henry as King. 

Gardiner was supportive of Henry but he was also an ardent foe of Protestant ideas coming from the Continent.  Gardiner was one of the staunchest proponents of the 1536 “Six Articles” which was an attempt to check the spread of Protestant doctrines in England.  He also smelled the rat of heresy in Cranmer and tried—unsuccessfully— to expose Cranmer as a heretic in hopes that Henry would turn against his Archbishop.

Cranmer was a crypto-Protestant and Henry knew it, but as much as Henry did not want the Church to fall away from its Catholic practices, he needed Cranmer to support the Royal Supremacy.  Henry ignored Cranmer’s Protestant sympathies and Cranmer, as long as Henry was alive, did not deviate from Catholic practices—at least in public.

Once Henry was dead however, the battle between the Catholic party headed by Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk and the Protestant party headed by Cranmer and the Duke of Somerset, uncle to the new king, broke out in full force.  Even before Henry’s death, Norfolk had been charged with treason and imprisoned where he remained through the reign of the new king.  After Henry’s death, Gardiner was deprived of his see and himself imprisoned for resisting the innovations that Cranmer was introducing into the liturgy.

Things change and the young Edward VI died but a boy.  His older half-sister Mary succeeded him and was determined to restore the Catholic faith.  Gardiner was one of Henry’s bishops she brought out of prison and restored to their sees with the blessing of the Pope.  Stephen Gardiner died while Mary was still on the throne and was buried in his cathedral of Winchester.  His tomb, an impressive piece of Italian renaissance masonry, can still be seen today. Gardiner was succeeded by John White who was deprived of his see and imprisoned when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558.   

Stephen Gardiner was another of those men who were Catholic at heart but whose ambition and loyalty to the crown blinded them to the possibilities of what might happen when the Church of England was removed from the universal communion.  This is the problem at which we need to look.  We will see that the Church of England, once it was removed from the Roman Communion, became, well, English.  It became identified exclusively with the national interest of England and its crown and lost an identity that transcended the particularities of race and politics.  We will see that the Church of England had some great vitality in the latter sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century, but that vitality could not be sustained because it was isolated from the wider experience of Christendom. The same thing happened to some extent to the Roman Church as it lost so much of its vitality in northern Europe and it became very, well, Italian.  Fortunately for us Catholics, while the papacy fell victim to this narrow nationalism, branches of the Catholic Church that survived in Eastern Europe, in Ireland, in Spain and its colonies, and elsewhere managed to develop their own specific traditions and identities as well and would balance out the baroque enthusiasm of Italian Catholicism.  In fact, an English Catholic Church would survive—somewhat underground—and develop very differently than the more Italianate papacy.  That English Church would bring Catholicism to the Americas and plant a very non-Roman sort of Catholicism in Maryland and Pennsylvania and provide the roots for an American Catholic Church today.  In many ways the Maryland Catholicism in which the American Church has its roots is somewhat shaped by the Puritan sobriety that would characterize Anglicanism in and after the reign of Elizabeth I and the conflict between this more restrained Catholicism and the exuberant immigrant Catholicism that would come with later waves of immigrants from Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe manifests itself in the conflicts within American Catholicism today.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVI

Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London 

In our last entry on the Church of England we looked at Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of Durham who, though a friend of Queen Katherine and supportive of her marriage to the King, when the chips were down sided with Henry in the break from Rome.  When Henry died and England began to move towards a more Protestant—Calvinist—position in matters religious, Tunstall objected and lost his diocese.  Restored to his bishopric under Queen Mary and reconciled to Rome, he stood fast in the Catholic camp when Elizabeth I reversed her half-sister’s Catholic policy in favor of a return to Protestantism.  We will look at these various twists and turns as England Protestantizes under Edward, reverts to Catholicism under Mary, and then goes Protestant again under Elizabeth, but today I want to look at another of Henry’s compliant churchmen who would later regret his choices, 

Edmund Bonner was born in or about 1500—possibly illegitimately—in circumstances of relative poverty in Worcestershire.  Despite his lower-class background he was admitted to Broadgates Hall, a hostel for law students, at Oxford. (Broadgates Hall was re-constituted as Pembroke College in the 17^th century and is still a constituent college of the University.)  Actually, before the gentrification of England—one of the fruits of the English Reformation—it was not at all unusual for even the poorest of young men to be able to find a place at Oxford or Cambridge and use that as a propellant into political, ecclesiastical, and economic advancement.  It was Calvinism, with its tying of material prosperity to the idea of God’s predestination, which contributed to the rigid stratification of English society, but that topic  is for another day.  Bonner earned his doctorate in Canon Law and became a chaplain to Cardinal Wolsey.  To Bonner’s credit, he remained loyal to Wolsey when the Cardinal fell in disgrace and was with him when Wolsey died at Leicester Abbey in the late autumn of 1530.  Taken into the King’s service as a protégé of Thomas Cromwell, Bonner went to Rome in 1532 to try to win Henry’s case for annulment, or at least to prevent the Pope and Curia from taking any action against Henry for his divorcing Katherine.  He suggested to Pope Clement that the Pope should allow Henry to appeal to a General Council for an annulment—a route that would let the Pope off the hook with the Emperor, Queen Katherine’s nephew, who opposed the annulment.

Of course, what Bonner—and back in England, Henry and Cromwell—did not understand was Clement’s policy of allying himself to the Emperor to further Medici policy in central Italy.  That policy opposed any annulment be it from the Pope or a Council.  But it was all in vain anyway as events were moving faster than Bonner’s diplomacy and Anne Boleyn’s 1533 pregnancy made it imperative that Henry marry her in time for the expected child—a hoped for son—to be a legitimate heir to the throne.  Of course the child was a daughter, but Henry was married and excommunicate and Bonner summoned home as Henry was losing interest in the papacy anyway.  Bonner was rewarded by Henry for his efforts with a number of well-salaried Church positions and entrusted with further diplomatic duties in embassies to the Emperor and to the King of France.  His rabid anti-papal tirades annoyed the French King but delighted Henry who in 1540 named him bishop of Hereford.  (By this time, of course, Henry had broken completely with the papacy and thus was naming bishops himself.)  Before he could be consecrated, however, Henry decided to name him to the far more prestigious see of London.  He was consecrated bishop in April 1540. 

Now Henry had broken with Rome but he was not inclined to introduce Protestant ideas into his Church.  The Church was Catholic—it just wasn’t papal anymore.  (It had never been “Roman,” from antiquity having its own Rites and peculiarities as outlined in previous postings.) Mass remained unchanged (except that the prayer for the Pope was dropped) and in Latin, clergy remained unmarried, prayers to the saints continued to be said, holy water and incense to be used.  As Bishop of London, Bonner was always vigilant against any Protestant ideas seeping into his diocese.  He was not a theologian—as he himself admitted—but a canon lawyer and he was very distrustful of any theological novelties.  London and Norwich, because of their being the primary ports, were always the first point where new ideas would come in and take root.  Londoners had long been disgusted with the Church and its clergy (as we saw in the entries about Richard Hunne) and consequently very open to the new Protestant ideas coming from Germany.  When Henry died and the new King, Edward VI—acting under the tutelage of his guardians, Thomas Cranmer and the Duke of Somerset—began to introduce Protestant practices, Bonner ardently resisted, but by then it was too late.  He was deprived of his see and thrown into the Marshalsea prison.  Upon the accession of Mary and the restoration of Catholicism, he was returned to his see where he was vigorous in searching out Protestants and handing them over for prosecution and execution.  His most famous prisoner was Thomas Cranmer, the deposed Archbishop of Canterbury, who was executed at Oxford in March 1556. 

With the Accession of Elizabeth, Catholicism was out and Protestantism back in.  Bonner was again deprived of his see and imprisoned.  Despite calls for his execution by the radical Protestant party, he remained in prison until his death in 1569.  Four times each year he was called out and given the opportunity to adjure his Catholic faith in favor of the Reformed Church of England with a promise of release, and each time he refused. 

Bonner, like Tunstall, and like Stephen Gardiner (with whom we have yet to deal) was very typical of the Churchmen of Henry’s time.  Only one bishop in England went to his death rather than give in to Henry’s demands to be recognized as head of the Church of England.  Most priests likewise acquiesced.  They were naïve in failing to see where the Church would go once it got mixed into the political machinations of rabid nationalists.  Thomas More and John Fisher, on the other hand, stood firm not so much because they believed in the papacy per se but because they knew that the Church by its very nature needs to transcend the political, cultural, and geographic limits that would otherwise divide it.  Catholics must always have an international outlook that sees the good of the entire human family as trumping the interests of any particular nation or society.